Page 29 of Paper Ghosts

“Did you know they keep yearbooks from every school year in the library?” Bailey asked Mim later that afternoon.

“If I did once, I’ve since forgotten.” Mim was in the corner kitchenette of the sunroom, taking the cookies she knew Bailey liked out of the packet and placing them on a plate. Tiny details like that sustained her. It meant Mim was paying attention.

“We had to write a timed research paper in the library today, without the internet.”

“That’s certainly a laborious way to do it.” Mim knew her way around technology. She was surrounded by old-school record albums and her television ran constantly, but she was always scrolling on her phone. Her creature comforts were all ordered online because she didn’t drive. She did own an ancient Buick Riviera, squirreled away in the garage, but she never took it out.

“That’s what we said.”

“And yearbooks were part of this research?” Mim asked, walking back and setting the plate of cookies on the table between them.

“No, but I looked up your senior yearbook while I was there.”

Mim had just lifted the teapot, but froze mid-pour.

“I found a great photo of you walking down the school hallway with two other girls. It called you the Feathers.”

She managed to stop pouring just short of the cup rim and set the teapot down. “Oh, that. We were the first girls in the school to feather our hair. That’s how we got the name. We thought we looked like stars. I’m glad your generation doesn’t have quite the love affair with hair spray we did. You might just fix the hole in the ozone we created.”

“Were they your friends?”

“They certainly were not.” She glanced at the sugar bowl. “I forgot to get sugar cubes from the main kitchen. I’ll be right back.”

Bailey frowned as Mim left. She reached over and lifted the lid. There were cubes already there.

The tension created by what Mim thought she might have found in the yearbook made her decide against also mentioning Andy Smooth and the conversation she’d overheard about Mim falling for him. Mim might get angry at Silas and Cody for talking about something she clearly didn’t want talked about.

But it begged the question: Why?

Mim’s footsteps had disappeared down the hallway, so Bailey got up and went to the low shelves lining the room. She rarely got to be in the sunroom alone, so she quickly scanned the spines of Mim’s record albums. Mim called them collectibles, as if their value meant something to her but the music didn’t, even though the ones she had were obviously well used. They were alphabetical, so she started with the A’s. Andy Smooth and the Silks wasn’t there, so she went to the S section.

And there it was.

The name of the album was Everywhere Girl, and on the cover was a woman in blue jeans and a halter top walking along a beautiful stretch of Midwestern highway at sunset, her thumb out for a ride.

Scribbled in messy handwriting across the cover was:

To Willamena, Stay Smooth. Yours, Andy.

Bailey turned it over and there was an index of the songs, as well as a photo of Andy Smooth onstage. A spotlight was on him, so the other band members were just shadows behind him. She jerked her head around when she heard Mim coming back down the hall. She angled the album cover to slide it back in with the others.

And that’s when a Polaroid fell out of the sleeve.

It had been taken at night in a parking lot. Mim was wearing a long, cotillion-like pink dress. Her blond hair was feathered away from her face like in the yearbook, so it must have been taken the same year. She was standing next to a brick wall, looking deeply at a man with dark hair, his back to the camera, a guitar case on the ground beside him. Their faces were very close. There was no question that Mim was unaware the photograph was being taken, because there was such vulnerability in her expression. She had dropped her guard for this man. It was heartbreakingly obvious that she loved him, loved him in a way she hadn’t loved her future husband.

Was this Andy Smooth?

Mim’s footsteps were getting closer. Bailey quickly put the photo back in the sleeve and stood, seconds before Mim entered. She pointed outside, as if she’d been standing there watching something. “The Brimleys’ dog escaped its fence again.”

“That dog is a menace,” Mim said as she sat.

Bailey walked back to her chair, watching Mim thoughtfully as she used the sugar tongs to place cubes in their cups.

If Mim had fallen in love, what other parts of the Wester narrative had she taken out, then filled in with an almost fairy-tale-like construction that suited her more, one that turned her into the mystical Witch of Wester House, coming into the world a fully formed adult, needing no one. It was a character Bailey found so hard to emulate, and now she understood why.

Real life could be turned into fiction. But fiction couldn’t be turned into real life, no matter how hard you tried.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN